⏩ FP! Week In Review #38

Also: Key Up Wing and Down Wing news from the week that was

In Case You Missed It ...

💥 How would Alan Greenspan approach the AI boom? (Wednesday, 1355 words)

✨💪 AI, jobs, and productivity: My chat with economist Erik Brynjolfsson (Thursday podcast)

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⤴️⤵️ Up Wing/Down Wing

A selection of pro-progress and anti-progress news items from the past week.

⤴ Up Wing Things

AI Policy & Regulation

• Powerful Anthropic model, Fable 5, on track to return soon - Axios

• Trump Administration Rolls Back Part of Anthropic Model Ban - WSJ

• How Europe must respond to America’s AI warning shot - The Economist

• AI Is the European Union’s Make-or-Break Moment - Bloomberg

• Big Tech critic loses House race in New York as AI lobby flexes political power - FT

AI & Jobs

• The New Push to Ready Millions for AI Career Upheaval - WSJ

• Everyone is worried about AI killing jobs. She’s testing a fix-it plan. - Washington Post

• $500 million AI jobs push launches with bipartisan backing - POLITICO

• Opinion | A.I. Doomaxxing Is Bad for Our Economy - NYT

• AI Is a Boon to Ambitious Recent Grads - WSJ

• Why Human Intelligence Matters More in an AI World - Rand

• Robot nation: China’s bid to beat its demographic decline - FT

AI Economics

• Who Gains in an AI-Supercharged Economy? - Project Syndicate

• The shrinking arguments for degrowth - FT

• Artificial Intelligence in the Real Economy: A Visual Guide - FT

• The rise and fall of US hegemony - FT

Energy & Nuclear

• Walmart Goes Nuclear - Heatmap News

• US federal loan to jumpstart AP1000 reactor supply chain - World Nuclear News

• Trump’s Big Nuclear Play Is Here - Heatmap

• Elementl Power plans BWRX-300 SMRs in Ohio - World Nuclear News

• Valar Atomics achieves criticality in DOE Reactor Pilot Program - World Nuclear News

• As AI Companies Race for Power, Amazon and Google Have the Lead - WSJ

• Are Backyard Data Centers an Answer to AI’s Biggest Problem? - Bloomberg

• Nvidia says AI’s water challenge is largely solved - Axios

• Air-Con Is So Much Better Than Sleeping Downstairs - Bloomberg

Chips & Computing

• IBM claims world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip technology - Ars Technica

• IBM Says It Has Found a Way to Keep Shrinking the Technology Inside Chips - NYT

• The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking - MIT Technology Review

• Chicago Missed the Tech Boom. Quantum Computing Gives It a Second Chance. - WSJ

Space

• SpaceX’s secretive plans to deliver cargo to Earth from space - New Scientist

• With Starfall, SpaceX eyes an edge in global cargo delivery from orbit - Ars Technica

• SpaceX Strikes $6 Billion Deal With AI Startup for Data-Center Space - WSJ

Tech Industry & Science

• Bacteria-killing viruses redirect vaccine immunity to destroy cancer - New Scientist

• OpenAI’s Codex agents are growing in popularity - Axios

• Meta races to replace human moderation with AI - FT

• Anthropic Veterans’ Startup Seeks to Help Scientists Develop Their Own AI - WSJ

• See How AI Giants Are Using AI in Their Own Offices - WSJ

• GLP-1–Induced Weight Loss and the Female Obesity Penalty - Edward Conard

• Meta Has Created a Prediction Markets App - NYT

• Agility, Maker of Humanlike Robots, to Go Public in $2.5 Billion SPAC Deal - WSJ

• Bain tests software takeover targets by vibecoding AI replicas - FT

• Brain-computer interface trials are taking off - MIT Technology Review

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⤵ Down Wing Things

AI Policy & National Security

• OpenAI Limits Access to New Models, Citing Government Security Concerns - WSJ

• The U.S. government will decide who gets to use the latest American AI technology - WashPost

• Trump administration asks OpenAI to limit next model release - Axios

• ASML confirms no EUV machines in China amid US concerns - Edward Conard

AI Backlash

• The AI backlash is only getting started - The Economist

• America’s data-centre backlash puts the AI boom at risk - The Economist

• Data centers become the face of AI backlash - Axios

• Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers - Yahoo Tech

• New Super PAC, the Guardrails Alliance, Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit A.I. - NYT

• Key House Democrat Calls for a National Data Center Moratorium - Heatmap News

• Data Centers Have a Farmland Problem, Too - Heatmap

• The Market’s AI Fanfare Is Running Into a Harsh Political Reality - WSJ

AI Geopolitics

• In AI race vs. U.S., China eyes a come-from-behind victory - The Washington Post

• DeepSeek plans hiring spree in escalation of China’s AI talent war - FT

• China is having another AI moment - The Economist

• Japan Inc. Is Right to Fear AI ‘Black Ships’ - Bloomberg

• War by Other Means - Palladium

AI Economy & Markets

• Is AI Good at Stock-Market Timing? A New Study Casts Doubt - WSJ

• The Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation - WSJ

• AI Won’t Cull Bankers, But It May Eat Their Bonuses - Bloomberg

• Everyone vs. Superintelligence? - WSJ

• A rogue superintelligence could wait decades before striking - IAI News

Space

• SpaceX sheds $400bn in market value as debut rally hits reverse - FT

• NASA’s Moon Plan Depends on 15 Starship Launches. There’s Just One Problem - Gizmodo

• Report: Kennedy Space Center not ready for era of super heavy rockets - Ars Technica

• America’s intractable air traffic problem - FT

Politics & Society

• In New York and Britain, Socialism Is on the March - WSJ

• Why is it so hard for liberals to take the W? - The Argument

• Brexit Has Cost the UK Growth, Analysts Say, in the Decade Since the Vote - NYT

• RFK Jr. has not abandoned his anti-vaccine agenda - The Washington Post

Climate & Misc

• The “sad inevitability” of Europe’s heat wave - Ars Technica

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↕️ Which Wing Things?

AI Industry & Companies

• Anthropic Thinks Its Own Success Is Key to Making AI Safe - WIRED

• Anthropic’s astonishing commercial success makes it a target - The Economist

• How the DeepMind mafia brought the AI boom to London - FT

• OpenAI Leans Toward Waiting Until Next Year for I.P.O. - NYT

• Microsoft’s Satya Nadella: We Can’t Let AI Giants Eat the Economy - WSJ

• Secretive Wall Street Powerhouse Jane Street Seizes the AI Spotlight - WSJ

AI Safety & Security

• The White House said Anthropic’s powerful AI was ‘jailbroken.’ Here’s what that means. - The Washington Post

• U.S. Presses Meta to Agree to A.I. Reviews as Security Concerns Rise - NYT

• AI Needs Public Quality Testing - WSJ

• What AI Can’t—or Shouldn’t—Do for You - WSJ

AI & Jobs

• Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’ - FT

• GM installs robots at flagship EV factory after laying off 1,300 workers - Ars Technica

• A Roadmap for the Upcoming Labor Transition - AI Frontiers

• Will AI Yield Abundance Without Purpose? by Carl Benedikt Frey - Project Syndicate

AI Economics & Compute

• How a Niche Technology Became a Choke Point for A.I. - NYT

• How much compute does the world really need? - FT

• What if ideas aren’t getting harder to find, after all? - FT

Quantum & Space

• Trump Seeks to Boost Quantum Computing With New Executive Orders - WSJ

• A US military exercise in space got underway with barely anyone noticing - Ars Technica

Science & Society

• Our Cities Were Designed for the Weather of the 1950s and ‘60s - WSJ

• Opinion | Would You Want to Know Your Baby’s Genetic Future? - NYT

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Essay Summaries and Podcast Transcripts

(Essay summaries formatted by AI, written by me. Transcripts are (laboriously) human edited.)

💥 How would Alan Greenspan approach the AI boom?

Why it matters: Alan Greenspan was a key policymaker during Up Wing 2.0, when the information-technology revolution—PCs, software, semiconductors, and the commercial internet—appeared to reverse the Great Downshift. Productivity growth accelerated, stocks soared, and pundits hailed the arrival of a “New Economy.”

The productivity gambit: At the Sept. 24, 1996 FOMC meeting, Greenspan dug in his heels to test his hypothesis that productivity growth was accelerating, even though it was not yet clearly visible in the official data. If he was correct, inflation concerns were overstated, and there was no need to raise rates. Spoiler: He was correct and the boom powered on.

Exuberance, rationally checked: Months later, at AEI, Greenspan warned that “irrational exuberance” might have unduly escalated asset values. Just tossing it out there!

Now another tech boom to evaluate: Generative AI appears to be a powerful general-purpose technology in its own right. Goldman Sachs says the AI boom is not vaporware and still lacks most 1990s-style macro red flags. But, but, but …

The catch: The spread between market pricing and project baseline economic value continues to grow. That gap can be traversed, maybe, but only with optimistic assumptions, including rapid AI adoption and resulting large productivity gains. Which could happen!

The bottom line: The AI boom may be turning bubblicious—but it’s also evidence that technological progress has caused something quite substantial and valuable to happen.

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💪 AI, jobs, and productivity: My chat with economist Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson—senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab—joined me to discuss whether AI will displace or empower workers, why Silicon Valley and the East Coast see its economic impact so differently, and how companies can generate big productivity gains.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation (which is also available on Spotify, Apple, and so forth):

What AI brings to the table

Pethokoukis: Why should workers be excited? Why should they be excited by the AI revolution? They hear CEOs predict that if you sit behind a computer, your job will be gone in 18 months. They’ve tempered their predictions a bit lately, but still, I certainly could forgive someone for thinking that, unless I’m in the business of constructing a data center, I’m an actual worker building a data center, the AI future doesn’t have much in store for me.

Brynjolfsson: It’s so frustrating that the narrative has become dominated by the doom-and-gloom side. I don’t want to sugarcoat it. There is a lot of disruption. There are jobs disappearing, but I think the bigger story is all the stuff that’s being created. Let me tell you a little anecdote. It’s a little bit sad, but I think it has a happy ending, which is that there was a graduating senior who came to my office hours about a month ago and she was very distraught. She said she did not have a job, and her friends didn’t have jobs, and she said, quote, “Is my generation doomed?” She was worried and I didn’t want to say, hey, there’s nothing wrong. It is a challenge for people. The data show that college graduates are having a harder time getting jobs than before, but I’m teaching a class called the AI Awakening.

The point of the class is that everybody in it is building real products by coding. They’re using Claude, Cowork, and other tools to create new kinds of enterprises. In past years, they would’ve ended the class with a PowerPoint presentation. This year I said, no, no, no, none of that. You have to have a working product for your final presentation. And they all did. That’s something that just wouldn’t have been possible five years ago, or even one year ago. I told this student, you got to lean into that side of it, all the stuff that can be created. This is, I think, the best time to be alive if you’re somebody who’s got agency and ambition and intention and wants to do something, create new things for themselves and for the world. But that’s not the story that’s out there. It’s all focused on the part that’s disappearing, which is real, but equally important, or I think more important, is the opportunities to create new things.